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Is this a good time to mention that animal ag is the most wasteful form of food we have? Further, consider capitalism and western rich countries. If the choice is between feedin poor people and feeding cows, what choice will the money make?
Plant a vegetable garden?WHERE?
DO YOU THINK I CAN AFFORD A YARD?
Hydroponic indoor gardening is the way. (I assume - I don’t grow any food hahahahaha)
I have a copy of this little pamphlet called Fugitive Gardens, which is all about gardening in small spaces, such as a fire escape.
It’s all fun and games until there’s a fire.
Most chemical fertilizer is synthesised from LNG.
The two biggest exporters are Russia (sanctioned) and Qatar (all plants shut down)
Good thing I have a couple of acquaintances that have small farms and produce, so if shit goes downhill, I know where to offer my labor
A lot of dreamers here who never actually tried to grow something. A lot of YouTube video knowledge but no practical experience.
Its damn difficult to grow your own food. I think buying canned goods and storing them is the best option for almost everyone instead of trying to grow your own.
Yeah, my peppers got too much calcium and had black ends. Cucumbers got too yellow. Cabbage worked fine, but I fucking hate cabbage. Beans were seriously lacking. Shit certainly isn’t easy, and it’s way to easy to think, hey, I can do this no problem!
Buying dry food is probably better than canned. It’s lighter, stores for longer, and is much more compact.
Are we talking like, bags of rice and beans?
Rice, lentils, peas, beans, wheat berries, barley, oats, etc. But if you buy in large bulk (which you should do for the cost savings), you should repack the goods into smaller individually sealed containers. Because a 25kg bag of rice, once opened, will take a small family all year to get through, and having an open bag of rice attracts rodents, weevils, moisture, mould and dust. Pack it down into half kilo or 1kg containers, ideally vacuum sealed or with some other preventative treatment. Then only open 1 container at a time.
This is good advice not just for building resilience against food cost shocks, but just generally good practice for saving money by buying in bulk and repacking yourself. Around here,a 25kg bag of rice costs me about $40, but buying 25kgs of rice in individual kilo bags at the supermarket costs $3.50 per kilogram for the cheap stuff, or $7.50 for the premium stuff ($88 or $188 respectively for 25kg worth)
Bro my cacti died. Both of them.
ok you can stay away from the garden and take a more motivational role
I grow a lot of stuff in a relatively small space. Sometimes I have to give stuff away because it’s too much for me. Maybe living in a tropical region helps? or maybe because I grow mostly native stuff that needs near to zero care.
Living in a tropical region definitely helps. Up north, the selection is difficult. Where and when you plant different items is really important, since you can very easily kill the plant if you plant it too early or late
That’s interesting to know. I never paid attention to timing when planting. We can plant most things in any season without much difference around here. Sometimes, things grow “spontaneously”, like the papaya tree that appeared last year and is already mature and giving fruits. Looks like I’m playing real-life stardew valley in easy mode >.<
LOL yeah. Stuff actually grows in tropical regions! :p
I’m happy for you there. (Although I imagine pest control gets interesting haha)
Southwestern U.S desert? Yeah, another story. Hydroponics are basically the best bet for your typical suburbia-dweller, I think.
Indeed, I have some trouble with pests, especially with the guava tree, but I’ve been using the technique of covering the young fruits in clothing bags so that pests can’t access them, and it’ has been effective so far. Needs a bit of work, but it’s cheap and doesn’t need using any chemicals. Sometimes, a naughty possum comes and takes something away, but it’s not so frequent, so I let them take their share lol. I once planted a broccoli that was growing so big and nice-looking, but had it suddenly disappear, eaten by a group of caterpillars.
But I simply avoid the things that attracted pests and favor the ones that grow without much need of maintenance, like acerola, cassava, some pumpkins, passion fruits, some wild grape-like fruits, and so on. My backyard looks like an abandoned house with the wilds taking over, i admit, but well, I like it that way…
The best is community roles in a collective. If you try to do everything yourself you’ll fail but in specializing you’ll succeed. For produce, one neighbor specializes in tomatoes, the other cucumber, the other onions, etc etc… that’s how human society survived in tough times and that’s actually as a species how we’re supposed to operate. As a community. Another reason why everyone is so dang lonely and depressed. Anyways, I digress…
As a species we were never supposed to operate by giving all labour and spoils to tree people, it’s speciciede
Yep, find your local CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) and get a membership
As someone who has been trying to grow tomatoes in containers for about 10 years, I can confirm that it really is difficult. It took me about 5 years to achieve fairly consistent results and get the hang of properly amending the soil, planting correctly, watering, pruning etc. And I still have years where the production is really low, largely due to fungal diseases.
see what you should have done is just toss some rotten ones onto your driveway or behind the shed and ignored them and next year you’d have had the biggest baddest bitchingest tomato plants you’d ever seen
Not wanting to add complexity or anything but have you considered trying a deep water culture (DWC) hydroponic system? That’s all a fancy way to say a dark colored large 5-ish gallon bucket of water with specific hydroponic nutrients dissolved in the water (I use a generic balanced powder and it works nicely) and an air pump to keep the water from going stagnant. As long as you keep the air pump dry, you can do the whole thing outside without issue. I hang mine under a plastic camera guard and it works nicely.
I’m terrible at growing things in dirt because dirt remembers what you did to it (holds salts and nutrient excess unless you flush the soil), but hydroponics is a totally different thing. You can just toss the water and give it new when it starts showing signs of nutrient deficiency/toxicity. The roots end up massive and healthy and everything grows faster since there’s zero resistance in the growth medium. Just sucking up everything they can. Tho since the typical advice is to just completely toss the water at least weekly once it’s grown up (great for outside gardens or houseplants after the tomato buckets), you usually don’t end up with imbalances like that at all.
Proper care of a hydro system makes for a bountiful harvest most years, and if you want, you can very easily keep a tomato clone over winter to keep some smaller amount of production going. Hydro works very well inside because you don’t bring most of the bugs you would with a dirt pot.
Throw like 4 standard screw-in daylight bulbs of 60+watt-equivalent leds and you’ve got a grow space. No fancy expensive nonsense required.
We planted tomatoes on the backyard last year and we drowned in them, kilos and kilos of the stuff
It also would’ve been a lot cheaper to get the same amount from the grocery store 😅
Yeah. I have the largest respect for people who manage to get that far. It really is not easy.
Good thing my country exports 90% of its agricultural produce, so if we start getting hungry then we’ll just export a bit less.
(We learned the hard way a long time ago when we ran out of potatoes.)
Ireland was exporting food during the potato famine.
Don’t assume your food won’t continue to be sold overseas if the growers/wholesalers can make more money that way.
Ireland was exporting food during the potato famine.
*Britian was exporting food from Ireland during the famine.
Regardless of nationality, don’t expect your billionaire overlord to have ethics if it comes at the cost of a 0.7% income loss
No, you have to expect your government to do that, which is why almost the entire world is not hyper capitalist choochoo trains
I mean, you exported 90% of your agricultural produce back then, too.
Piss in a bucket. There’s your ammonia.
Damn, imagine if we hadn’t depleted our soils of nutrients through unsustainable agricultural practices requiring us to pump unsustainable chemical fertilisers into the ground.
Combined with reducing the half a years supply of food per person that we waste per person each year. And using local native species instead of unsuitable foreign crops, we wouldn’t have to worry about any of that right now.
Oh well, now millions of the global south get to starve to death as we
stealpurchase their dwindling crops. Modern society is the best thing ever and we should make no effort to change it.How, with the 3-field rotation method from the middle ages? It was super sustainable but we’d need 3x more farmland
Ehh… We kinda missed the boat on that by like a hundred years. Even before the Haber process allowed us to allocate ammonia chemically, we had started to worse and worse famine pop up globally. We just have more people on earth than the natural nitrogen cycle can support through agricultural means.
No, we don’t
Grow a garden where? On what fucking land lmao
You bought land, right? Right!?
whatever land you can take.
some cities have programs that allocate park or unused land for community gardens. some even give you a small budget to build infrastructure like beds or buying dirt.
grow staple foods that have long storage life: squash, pumpkins, carrots, rutabaga, potatoes. these can stay on your shelf for 3-8 months if stored properly. personally I have about 12 (3-5lbs each) spaghetti squash sitting since harvest in November that will be fine until about August.
secondary are things you can freeze or dry: squash, peppers, peas, green beans, Lima beans, kidney beans, cabbage, beets. I dry most of these and toss them into soups and ramen.
tertiary are foods you can process and preserved through canning, drying, or freezing: tomatoes (sauce or breaded), okra (breaded), etc…
your diet will change, but you’ll feel good about what you’re cooking because you grew it.
also, stay away from petroleum based fertilizers. if you add too much or too often you can burn your soil out and kill your crop. if you used naturally derived fertilizers you don’t have to be as careful.
good luck!
Plant the 3 sisters (beans, corn, squash/pumpkin) together in a small area to maximize shelf stable production. You will need to do a small amount of research on planting times but the times are fast approaching.
You will need to do a small amount of research on planting times
And climate zone. There are many places where it is too cold.
Not everyone lives like sardines in concrete jungles.
Yeah I get that, what I’m saying is most of us can’t afford land, let alone a house. Cool if you can but I’m not lucky.
Yes, it’s a shame how the system is designed to trap people into paying rent so they never save enough to own property.
grains and pulses
What are pulses?
lentils and their friends
You should always feel free to grow a garden, but you shouldn’t necessarily expect it to be cheaper than buying food. Especially the first year, if you don’t live in a place where you can just dig up some dirt and chunk seeds in it. Even if you do you should make sure the soil isn’t literally toxic first, especially since it’s common to have a buildup of things like lead or arsenic from now-outlawed fertilizers that can be absorbed by plants.
My grandparents planted maybe half an acre? Of crops for 10 people, and it was supplemental, not a complete replacement. It also takes a lot of work and can go to shit if the weather is bad. You can account for some of this by planting a variety of crops, trying to head off drainage and shade issues before they start, and with supplemental watering. But don’t expect everything to be super productive every year, especially in the age of climate change. My sister had some plants not put out at all last year (peppers).
That’s the thing. Gardening is more expensive than buying food, in the United States and Western Europe, now, because the real cost of food production is heavily subsidized by our governments and we guarantee yields by throwing tons of fossil fuels and their derivatives at the soil of corporate megafarms. There’s a nonzero chance that’s going to change shortly - probably within a generation - for a ton of reasons including but not limited to little Donnie assassinating the supreme leader of Iran for shits and giggles.
Grow a garden even if it’s not economically efficient. Do it now, when you aren’t relying on it for food, and get the issues with soil and drainage and so on worked out now. Learn to save seeds and select the best growing plants each year so that, as your climate changes, the varieties you grow change with it. That way you’ll have the skills to do it later, when you really need it.
My partner and I are in conflict about food storage. I buy beans, pasta, and jarred foods when I’m stressed. He doesn’t like sacrificing storage space and I think just sees it as clutter.
Anyways, I’m going to pick up more pasta, pasta sauce, and canned soup. Boxed macaroni and cheese. Stuff I know we’ll cycle through and doesn’t need much effort to cook because I know when things get bad I won’t want to brain much.
Oh! LPT: textured vegetable protein is shelf stable dried soy protein and you can rehydrate it to add a ground beefy texture to things, like macaroni and cheese or pasta sauce.
It’s not a good thing to do that based on stress levels as opposed to a practical space minded approach that keeps in mind actual risk
I don’t think I’m trying to over stock. It’s things like buying more pasta when we’re down to 5 boxes instead of 0. We go through it, we just disagree on how much we should keep on hand.
So far, the trick has been to keep the backlog out of sight and refill the main cupboard as needed. Like, he knows I keep extra, but he doesn’t look for himself because it’s in the low-down awkward corner cupboard.
I guess I’d rather stress-buy pasta than gacha toys or another multitool or something, and I’m stressed for various reasons my therapist knows about.
It’s easy to go overboard and make silly choices, but it’s also easy to plan a good contingency. I keep 1 year of dried food and 3 months of canned / jarred / frozen food. Any more than that and it gets wasteful for me. I have backup grid-independent solar power, and I also keep a small veggie garden going most of the year.
I like to re-pack my dried foods into emptied, washed, and dried PET bottles, because they store better. I use 1L Waterford’s bottles because their shape is perfect for maximizing storage and stack ability. I repack large bags of dried food into these with oxygen absorbers, and packed this way, rice, lentils, wheat berries, and barley will last 20 years. Rolled oats will last a couple years. Sugar and salt will last indefinitely. Scaling them down to 1L individual volumes means you can crack one without introducing contaminants to the others
Keeping a rigid system of labelling, inspecting and rotating your goods is as important as having them in the firstvplace
I’m still in the “mark expiration year in big marker” stage of rotating food, but that’s been easy enough to keep up with.
Sadly, my condo doesn’t allow vegetable gardens on our porch because of the real threat of visiting bears. I sneak in some herbs because they’re not vegetables, but the HOA can be persnickety.
Personally I think it’s worth a little space to have peace of mind. Also depending on where you live having a few week supply of food and drinking water in storage is generally recommended in case of a natural disaster.
That said, if you’re in a western countries that produces most of its own food you’ll probably be fine. Those countries produce such an incredibly surplus that much of it gets diverted towards animal agriculture. If you can afford meat and dairy now you’ll probably be able to afford rice and beans if prices rise.
Natural gas is used to produce hydrogen, which is then used in the Haber-Bosch process to produce ammonia from nitrogen in the atmosphere. Only about 6% of natural gas is used to produce hydrogen, so even if the price were to rise substantially, we could divert natural gas from other uses and have plenty for making ammonia. We also have other ways of producing hydrogen, it’s just that natural gas is more established.
PEM electrolyzers paired with cheap solar in countries with high insolation can now produce hydrogen for less than the cost of natural gas, but we’re only recently starting to see the construction of the large-scale green ammonia plants needed to accomplish this. Egypt is currently constructing a 100-MW green ammonia plant powered by solar energy. Even if you didn’t have enough PEM eletrolyzers you could still just pass current through some salt water and produce hydrogen, albeit much less efficiently.
It’s not going to be a catastrophic issue.
It might not be a massive scientific issue but I bet prices will still rise and the news will be fearmongering causing pricing to go up and never come back down. It’s a capitalism issue and corruption and greed.
Fun fact: Fritz Haber, the German guy that invented the Haber-Bosch process is the same Fritz Haber that developed a way to use the chlorine gas in chemical warfare. He was personally overseeing its effect in the battle of Ypres.
Clara Immerwahr, who was married to Fritz Haber and was a successful chemist in her own right, spoke out against his research as a “perversion of the ideals of science” and “a sign of barbarity, corrupting the very discipline which ought to bring new insights into life.” She ended her own life the day before he traveled to the eastern front to oversee the use of chlorine gas against Russian troops.
Dude knew his chemicals
Habe
rn wir einen an der Waffel? Ja
Thank you for explaining the process, because the pro-fuel-cell pact doesn’t understand that hydrogen isn’t free and production is still heavily reliant on fossil fuels.
“Oh it comes from ammonia”. Alright, where does the ammonia come from???
You’re just moving the problem around, not fixing anything.
You’ll make hydrogen from renewable energy. That is the point.
But why not just make electricity from renewable energy?
Like, I get the benefit of fuel cells, but people need to realize that hydrogen closer to a battery than a fuel source itself. You’re expending energy now to make storage of energy that can be tapped later.
It’s good for places where vehicles can’t tap into the grid and need dense energy storage (i.e. transoceanic freighters), or where long charging times are infeasible (like long-range trucking).
And probably good for grid-level storage, too.
But for a typical family car/commuter? There’s really no point. You’re adding more steps in energy conversion, and losing efficiency at every additional step (thanks to basic physics), and to gain what? A faster refueling time on a long road trip? An experience closer to what we were used to with ICE-cars? An experience that really isn’t that great anywhere that has a winter. Or an excessively hot summer.
Maybe for people who can’t have a charger at home, even an L1, but there are better solutions for that (like…adding an outlet? Making landlords responsible for providing power whenever there is parking? More municipal charging locations?)
You can’t fertilize crops with electricity, nor can you eat it
Making food from pure electricity would be a cool sci-fi thing
You can’t store electricity by itself. The problem we are facing is massive curtailment, i.e. massive overproduction of green energy that can’t be utilized. There needs to be way of storing it at a massive scale. There is no feasible way of storing that much energy in conventional batteries.
If you can acknowledge that hydrogen is needed for dense energy storage and grid-level storage, then you should realize that we will eventually have a huge hydrogen infrastructure, and production capacity to match. That will create very cheap green hydrogen, and will mirror what happened with solar and wind.
Cheap hydrogen alone will drive large-scale adoption of hydrogen cars, regardless of the popularity of BEVs. A lot of people will choose hydrogen cars (possible e-fuel cars too, since e-fuels can be made from hydrogen) simply because it is akin to an ICE-car in usage.
The other point is that battery production is not green and is very resource intensive. Hydrogen cars let’s you avoid that almost entirely. In the long-run, it will be pointless to care about efficiency when green energy becomes nearly free. That suggests hydrogen, not batteries, is the better idea.
Farmers almost uniformly over-apply N fertilizer. Having it be more expensive and forcing them to look into more efficient ways of applying fertilizer and managing nutrients is not a bad thing.
Unless it just causes the crop to cost more without any change in behavior.
Farmers are price-takers not price-makers. The prices they receive are driven by speculation on the commodities markets (even for crops not traded on the market).
Since they can’t control the price they receive for their crop, they are very sensitive to any change in the cost of inputs. Determining how much to spent on inputs is the part of their profitablity they can control. So widespread behavioral change is usually pretty close to immediate.
we could divert natural gas from other uses and have plenty for making ammonia. We also have other ways of producing hydrogen
We can’t do any of those in a scale large enough to replace the destruction and have it online for the next planting season on the North Hemisphere. Or the next one on the South Hemisphere either, btw. Or the following ones for each.
Also, while it’s still new, plasma nitrogen has the potential to rapidly scale if the economics stop making sense for Haber-Bosch nitrogen.
It’s not just fertilizer:
it takes about 7.3 units of (primarily) fossil energy to produce one unit of food energy
Assessing the sustainability of the US food system: a life cycle perspective
With all the fertilizer, heavy equipment and agricultural practices the food production today is very inefficient from an energy perspective.
Without cheap, abundant energy available the whole food production system is not sustainable
It would be a hell of a lot more sustainable if we ended animal agriculture.
Exactly. The Swedish government or something did some study recently to determine if we’d be able to be self-sufficient under a longer time if we needed to be, as we currently have a lot of food imports. The conclusion was “yes, but there won’t be as much food diversity”.
However, they completely ignored the fact that we only have a ~90 days strategic reserve of oil, and that basically all the machining used for farming runs on diesel. And there’s currently no goals to change that.
If we can’t import or refine diesel anymore, we will starve.
plug myself into the power socket for more efficient energy usage.
got it.
brb
I’m surprised to see this truth known on the Internet, I guess Lemmy actually is smarter than most other social media out there :o
You think food prices will come back down after it’s all over?
cue the padme meme!
FACT: Capitalism without regulation has a ratcheting effect on high prices.
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!
As if you’d need to ask that question…
